Engineering ethics: Can technology stop mass shootings?

[C C]

http://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.co...tings.html

EXCERPT: [...] Dionne's idea is to focus on gunmakers, who sell almost half their output to governments of various forms (federal, state, and local) and who might start making safer guns if that segment of the market demanded them. Safer how? Dionne mentions two technologies that might mitigate unlawful gun use: smart guns that can be used only by their owner, and microstamping of guns and bullets.

[...] The main weakness of Dionne's technological fixes has nothing to do with the virtues or flaws of a given new technology. As Charles Krauthammer pointed out in his column last week, even if every new gun sold was smart enough to shoot only at truly bad guys, there were some 350 million guns in the U. S. as of last year (more than one for every man, woman, and child), and the only effective gun law that would stand a chance of reducing mass shootings would have to round up the ones out there already. [...] Unless the great majority of gun owners in the U. S. decide it's just not a good idea to have a gun around, those 350 million weapons are not going to go away any time soon. And anybody without a serious criminal record (and even some with one) can still get one of them. Current technological fixes for the problem simply don't seem to have the political traction to get very far....

[stryder]

If people didn't have guns to kill each other with, they would use knives, bats, rocks or whatever else they can lay their hands on to do the same job.

The problem is the mentality that certain people have. Where if they feel wronged and ignored that they have to shoot someone or blow something up rather than find some other way to deal with the problem. On top of that there is also the mentality of those people that fuel their need for vengeance by trolling them (such as spurring them on, or suggesting they are weak if they don't go through with it). Those people get off on assuming that they control them like a puppet by pulling their strings and watch the fall out. What they don't consider however is they are in fact an accessory to murder when one such person actually carries out an attack.